


Burn My Dreams Away

by misszeldasayre



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015), Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Angst, Drama, F/M, Love Triangles, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-23
Updated: 2018-02-23
Packaged: 2019-03-18 01:55:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,269
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13671864
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/misszeldasayre/pseuds/misszeldasayre
Summary: When Rey finally gets a chance to kiss Poe Dameron, kriffing Kylo Ren sees fit to interrupt. Rey must come to terms with her feelings for Kylo Ren before they implode.





	Burn My Dreams Away

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Ezfa](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ezfa/gifts).



_I would burn my dreams away just to stand in the thankless shadows of your reckless love._

_—Bleachers_

* * *

Poe Dameron is a damn good pilot. He's also a damn good kisser, or at least that used to be the rumor among the Resistance fighters. Rose swears her sister's old bunkmate heard it straight from the late Gold Squadron leader. Rumors, Rey reminds her, but Rose just laughs and asks Rey why she cares enough to argue about it.

In her gut, Rey knew her flirtations with Poe would lead to this. They've been spending a lot of time together: flying patrols together, teasing Finn and Rose for their covert displays of affection. Rey teaches Poe a thing or two about ship repair. Poe hugs her a second too long in reply.

She likes him—really, she does—but not in the manner he hints at. Whenever she pictures herself holding hands with Poe like Finn and Rose, the fiction she conjures up to hold wears not Resistance orange but a black cloak and a thick scowl that softens only for her.

Foolishness, that's what it is.

But kriff, does she deserve a break from the weight of the galaxy threatening to crush her like a ship in a space slug's maw. Poe's funny and reckless. Next to him, Rey forgets about the Resistance's dwindling food supply and the First Order's hunt, and the unmasked black shadow lurking in the back of her mind. Poe makes her want to be a little reckless, too.

So when he leans in one night, dinner a distant memory, the service corridor leading to their bunks empty, she doesn't duck out of reach or make excuses about the late hour. She lets Poe reach for her jaw, brush his fingers across her lips, wrap his hand around the back of her head, pulling her towards him.

If she strains hard enough, holds her breath long enough, Rey can almost feel a spark akin to warmth. But then his breath hits her chin, his expectations settling around her throat like a cold blanket, and any illusion of warmth snuffs out.

His lips are chapped, his palms rough. His touch transports Rey back to the dunes of Jakku, grains of sand catching in her robes and hair and boots. She fights the urge to swipe at the phantom tingles spreading through her cheeks. Instead she hesitantly leans into the embrace, uncertain of how to proceed but certain that she needs this distraction.

To Rey, with her eyes closed, Poe almost tastes hot and metallic, like the hilt of a lightsaber or a throne room set ablaze. But caf and sweat linger on his lips, reminding Rey with every brush of their noses that he's not the man whose mind she's been chasing after.

And then she smells it, the familiar metallic burning odor cutting through the caf and sweat. She blinks, and there  _he_  is. Kylo Ren, standing over her shoulder, watching the display with an inscrutable expression tumbling through his eyes. "What is this?" he asks, and after weeks of missing his voice—their connection—Rey's heart stumbles at the sound.

It's almost comical, the way Kylo's surprise gives way to simmering disgust, the way Poe hesitates when he notices that Rey's mouth has gone unresponsive. If Rey was anyone but herself, she might laugh. But right now, she wishes a sarlacc would swallow her whole.

As Kylo gapes and Poe pauses, Rey's embarrassment gives way to anger.

"How dare you?" The words thunder out of her heart before she can squeeze them back in. Poe holds up his hands, worry clouding his easy grin, but Rey's looking past him. "You can't just come now after months of not responding."

Kylo's frosty, disapproving look is so different than the fury Rey expects him to exude.

"Clearly I can't," he says icily before severing their connection. The loss of his presence [FINISH]. Slumping to the ground, she stares into the hallway, frustration [FINISH]. Poe grins nervously, and then he's gone down the metal corridor, his boots tapping questions across the floor.

An ache blooms at Rey's temples. She can't force herself to stand for several minutes, so she sits there, alone in a service corridor, brushing imagined sand from her face and whispering at the air like a fool. And what a skrogging fool she is.

* * *

The next time their minds connect, he yells at her, primal screams of rage. Her eyes don't leave his face. Shame burns hot between them. She doesn't waver in his flames.

When he finally disappears from her mind, Rey closes her eyes and pictures a shuddering, broken blade of light.

* * *

They go for days without connecting. Somehow without Kylo's presence lurking unexpectedly around every corner, Rey's days feel darker, colder. She busies herself by sparring with Finn, repairing ships, and avoiding Poe.

"What happened between you two?" Finn whispers as he, Rey, and Rose huddle together over dinner. Normally Poe joined them for every meal; tonight he's camouflaged among a group of pilots eating at a table in the corner. Only his curls peeking above the horde give him away.

Rey sighs, pushing the veg-meat and polystarch around her plate with her fork. When she catches Poe's eye from across the room, he ducks out of sight. His avoidance grates at Rey, the questions more so, like a pebble stuck in her boot that she can't shake loose. "I don't—"

"Don't give us any of that crinking 'I don't know,'" Rose interrupts, leaning in emphatically. "We all know you know."

They'll find out soon enough if they approach Poe. So Rey swallows and squares her shoulders. "We kissed."

Rose crows as she and Finn exchange knowing glances. "And?"

"It didn't go so well."

"What happened?"

"I…" How can Rey explain what really happened? She hasn't explained to her friends about the bond that persists between her and Kylo Ren. Telling them would cheapen the bond somehow, wash the bittersweetness from her mouth that blooms every time she connects with her enemy. They'd never understand the way she lets the bond deepen with each point of contact.

"I panicked. It was too much." A grain of truth nestles between the words. Rose and Finn nod.

Finn reaches over to pat Rey's arm. "He'll come back around." Rey smiles, but Finn's words of comfort conjure for Rey not a pilot's uniform, but black hair and blacker eyes, betrayal twisting a scar.

"I sure hope so," Rey says before biting into her polystarch. It dissolves into dust in her mouth.

* * *

Rolling dunes and ship carcasses haunt Rey's dreams tonight, and a dark silhouette on the horizon she can never quite reach. A flash of red, and she startles awake, wildly glancing around her for the man she was chasing. Or was he pursuing her? But she is alone in the dark of her bunk, save for Rose's snores.

Bolting upright, she throws off her blanket and sliding on her boots. Quietly, so as not to wake Rose slumbering in the top bunk, Rey slips out of their bedroom and heaves open the thick blast doors of the Resistance hideout until the night sky emerges, twin moons hanging above the treetops.

The crisp pine air cleanses away Rey's residual terror lingering from her dream. She is far from Jakku, among family here. But still, she feels abandoned in the stillness of the forest. Impulsively, she reaches for Kylo Ren.

It's late and they haven't spoken in weeks, yet she misses him all the same. When he appears before her, shirtless but alert, she fights back a grin. A small victory, getting him to let her into his mind. If she didn't know better, she'd say he was waiting for her.

But then she remembers how she's tried to contact him before, how he's rebuffed her advances, how his eyes flicker even now in the moonlight.

"Where have you been?" she asks. "I've missed you, and you wouldn't respond—"

"I couldn't." The stiff words match his posture. He holds himself rigid, but Rey senses his impulses simmering under the calm exterior.

"Why not?"

He just shakes his head in reply.

"I missed you," she says, scanning his face for a response. Rey's admission hangs between them in the shadows. Although Kylo doesn't blink, he steps closer until they're separated only by a few breaths.

"Did you?" he hisses, hands balling up into fists at his sides. "Because it looked like you weren't lonely, cavorting with that" —here he splutters, finding the right word to spit— "that flyboy!"

An incredulous snort catches in Rey's throat. "Are you… jealous?"

"No!" he protests, but the declaration rings hollow under Rey's scrutiny.

A thin smile twitches against her clenched jaw. "You are."

"Why would I be jealous of him?" Kylo says. "I'm the superior pilot." The claim comes out petulant like a child whining for a buttersweet puff.

This time, Rey can't contain her smile. "Right."

"I  _am_  the superior pilot," he insists, and the dark certainty in his tone implies his skills supersede Poe's in a variety of areas.

"What does it matter?" she scoffs. A challenge. Kylo's fists work out his frustration, a hundred tiny clenches and releases that Rey feels in her bones when she watches him.

Kylo looks away for the first time tonight. "It doesn't."

* * *

The supply run is routine; Rey could fly the route in her sleep. It's just her, Chewie, and a hull full of cargo for the Resistance. The  _Millennium Falcon_  under Chewie's capable pilotage, Rey retreats from the cockpit to sneak a few hours of sleep before they land at the Resistance hideout.

Before she makes it to the bunks, a hand reaches for her arm and pulls her into a small, windowed alcove. Rey's free hand reaches for her staff, yanking it from her back and shoving it the direction of her assailant.

One grunt from the intruder, and Rey recognizes who's holding her. "Get out of my mind," she says wearily to the black cloaked figure framed by the stars. "I'm tired."

"I know." Kylo Ren doesn't budge, although he releases his grip on her forearm and eyes her staff like a man facing a rabid rancor.

"What do you want?"

"Did you really miss me?" he asks, insistence grinding each syllable from a question into a statement.

When Rey sheathes her staff on her back, she notices how cramped this alcove is, how Kylo's eyes reflect the galaxy spreading before their window. The ship's lights filter through the transparisteel, twinkling like seaglass catching the sun.

"I need to know," he says.

"Why?" She can sense the barest outline of his emotions, but she'll make him say it anyway. She doesn't expect his reply.

"Please." No explanations, no excuses, just a tired request worn down to sand.

"I thought of you every day," she admits quietly.

Satisfaction, too earnest to be smug, blazes across his face. "Me too." As Rey inhales, she catches a whiff of singed metal, starship grease, and a warm spice she's only smelled once before, on Han Solo.

Kylo is everything Poe isn't, which is why Rey reaches for him, first for his hand (lacing their fingers together—so soft, so smooth), then for his back (her palms flush against the muscles she saw so long ago with his shirt off), then for his head (winding around his neck, tangling in his hair). There is no rough sand in his touch, only a searing longing as he tentatively brings his hands to her waist.

Without his mask, his breathing still heaves ragged in his chest while he's pressed up against her. His eyes, always so insistent, flicker under her gaze. "I am the superior pilot," he mutters. Rey shushes him with a grin and a finger to his lips.

The gesture, so easy and intimate, surprises Rey even as she touches him, and Kylo's eyes widen at the contact. That spark Rey had been looking for in another man on another planet ignites in her veins. One glance at the man before her, and she can tell he feels it, too.

So she closes her eyes, and they wait, discovering the liminal space between something and nothing. It's just her and Kylo Ren, nestled among a thousand stars.

Then he's kissing her, and she's kissing back, and for a moment, she feels light—if his hands left her waist, she might float away into the darkness. Their kiss is hard and sharp, a protest and a prayer. When Kylo goes to pull away, Rey tugs him back towards her.

Tracing his scar, her hands move nowhere and everywhere at once. The smoothness of it startles her, a polished bit of glass where she expected grit. Hot to the touch—she wonders if it still burns him, but he doesn't flinch when she presses her lips to the line dividing his soul.

Kissing Poe, an emptiness threatened to gnaw through her lungs. Kissing Kylo Ren, a wholeness permeates her skin. A delicate balance, made beautiful by its fleeting nature. Soon it will shatter like Luke's lightsaber in the room of fire and thrones. Their struggle will resume, light against dark, old versus new.

For now, though, they aren't Jedi and Sith, uneasy friends or reluctant foes. They are simply Rey and Ben, two hearts thrumming at the same pace.

Awe burns away their need, then smolders into reverence. A final kiss, and another, and Rey leans into him, unwilling to let go. They rest like that, forehead to forehead, until he winks out of sight.

**Author's Note:**

> I couldn’t resist working in all the prompts—they fit together well! Here's the playlist I kept listening to on repeat while writing this. Hope you enjoy the Reylo vibes. :)
> 
> Wild Heart, Bleachers  
> Homemade Dynamite, Lorde  
> I Need You, M83  
> The Glory, The Cranberries  
> Dust to Dust, The Civil Wars  
> Power + Control, Marina and the Diamonds  
> Rewrite the Stars, Zac Efron + Zendaya  
> Reckless Love, Bleachers


End file.
